Posts Tagged ‘Timegate’

Minimum is not the reason TimeGate dropped off the face of the earth. Not by a long shot. That would be a series of unfortunate events (and decisions) that forced the partial Aliens: Colonial Marines developer to file for Chapter 11 bankruptcy and close up shop. It was kind of an implosion. Among others, a jilted pizza place was involved. One would assume, then, that its final project, Minecraft-influenced shooter Minimum, ended up as collateral, given that Atari now owns the license and dubiously discarded Prey 2 steward Human Head is on development duties. What does all of that mean for the game, though? You can find out this weekend.

Welp, seems that time’s up for TimeGate. After the Section 8 and Aliens: Colonial Marines campaign dev filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy last week, reports recently surfaced that the entire operation’s now kaput. I did a little digging of my own, and sources very close to the company confirmed the reports to RPS without hesitation. Details are still fairly scant at the moment, but you’ll find a few after the break.

Despite what its name might imply, bankruptcy doesn’t necessarily mean death. Not for businesses, anyway. But yeesh, Aliens: Colonial Marines co-developer and Section 8 mastermind TimeGate has some far more frightening numbers to deal with than the looming specter of Chapter 11. The short version? The developer’s total liabilities (i.e. the amount they owe various creditors) fall in the $10 to $50 million bracket, presumably including $7.35 million stemming from a fraud suit by Section 8 publisher Southpeak. Things are not looking pretty, to put it lightly.

Oh, TimeGate. Still-unconfirmed (or denied) rumblingshave linked you to a rather sizable portion of Aliens: Colonial Marines’ acid-puking awfulness, so there’s your legacy for now. I’d be remiss, however, if I didn’t point out that the recently reviled studio’s proven reliably inoffensive in the past, producing middle-of-the-road manshoots like Section 8 and a few FEAR expansions. So it’s with a slightly less mountainous mound of trepidation than expected that I bring you word of Minimum, TimeGate’s new free-to-play shooter/slasher/watch two Greek-mythology-inspired titans go all Rock ‘Em, Sock ‘Em Robots on each other-er. Promisingly, its inspirations seem to run the gamut from Quake’s speed to Unreal’s arcadiness to Minecraft’s adaptability, but obviously, snapping all those puzzle pieces into a coherent whole is another matter entirely. I must say, though, the achy, breaky, blocky trailer after the break has me sort of intrigued.

If Aliens could cry, entire planets, ships, and conveniently placed ventilation systems would be dissolving under a torrential downpour of acid-laced tears right now. See, in spite of their lovable looks and multi-mouthed charm, no one wants to take credit for, well, pretty much anything about Aliens: Colonial Marines. First, Gearbox kinda did, but then TimeGate was accused of incubating Colonial Marines’ loathsome single-player campaign – which prompted Sega to descend from its mountain of unreleased Shenmue sequels and tilt the needle back in Gearbox’s direction. Seems like a lot of fuss to make if it was really all Gearbox at the helm, though, huh? And that’s where a winding Reddit post by an alleged Gearbox employee enters the picture. Further, RPS reached out to a former TimeGate employee (who wished to remain anonymous) to clarify the situation.

Edit – Sega Senior Producer Matthew J. Powers has said of this allegation that “Absolutely not, the game has been developed by Gearbox Software. Other studios [like Timegate] helped Gearbox on the production of single and multiplayer.” Which doesn’t really clear anything up, but there you go.

By almost all accounts, Aliens: Colonial Marines, released this week, is a trainwreck. And not one of those cool trainwrecks with explosions, collapsing bridges and men in awesome hats leaping to safety at the last second. Instead it sounds like a sad, slow, drift off the edge of the track, toppling gracelessly onto its side and making a limp ‘pffffffffffffffffff’ noise. Mister John Walker will be along either later today or tomorrow to confirm or deny this, but in the meantime let’s have a confusing look at the Gearbox shooter’s odd gestation. I say ‘Gearbox shooter’, but it rather sounds as though other studios did the heavy lifting.Read the rest of this entry »

I love it when people do stuff like this. In order to celebrate the first eleven weeks (because that’s a nice round number?) of man-death in their downloadable jetpackathon, Section 8: Prejudice, TimeGate have compiled an infographic of their stats pulled from Gamespy. It’s totally disposable, and pure marketing guff, but kind of fun in a “it only took twenty million-man hours to build the Panama Canal and that’s how much time we sink into Windows Minesweeper every day” sort of way. We should totally do an RPS infographic: “57,123,119 Angry Men Angered in the first six months…”

The players of Section 8: Prejudice have smashed the requisite ten million online kills, unlocking themselves Assault Mode, a new game type in which one team tries to capture points spread across the map and the other has to stop them. Timegate’s party line on it is as follows- “a fast-paced mode that encourages close cooperation with your team and unwavering focus on the goal of capturing or defending the base!” Holy shit! That sounds way more exciting than what I said. No video just yet, but you can watch a video of Prejudice’s Swarm mode after the jump, which is its four player co-op against-waves-of-enemies mode.Read the rest of this entry »

Science fiction FPS Section 8: Prejudice is finally out on PC today, for the slim price of $15. I’ve had a go at the single player campaign this week, which is a few hours long and encompasses most of what you’ll find in the multiplayer, while still being very much a scripted story sequence (as opposed to the pseudo-multiplayer single-player of the original.) It’s okay. I’ve not yet bothered with multiplayer, since we really need servers and PC community to be live and playing to make any judgement about it. As such I’ll say more about Prejudice in a few days time. What we can say now, however, is that TimeGate have announced a new mode “Assault”, which will unlock once the game sees 10-million online kills. Assault is apparently a race to capture the control points in the fastest time, with one team defending and ther other attacking. Since it’s already been out of Xbox for a while no, the kill-counter already reads six million, so I don’t think that new mode will too far away.

GUNS! Kicks to the face! A knife fight! Jetpacks! Robots! …Robots having a knife fight! Some elderly dude doing a voice-over about how “The hunter does not question his purpose”! VTOL aircraft! Robots! Energy cannons! A guy hanging by his fingertips! Esplosions! Ground vehicles being delivered from orbit! A gun larger than my flat! It’s all after the jump. When’s this coming out again? May 4th? OK.Read the rest of this entry »

That’s what’s in this new bit of Section 8: Prejudice footage (below) release by Timegate. It’s the map that I played the new co-op mode on in the hands-on event the other week. It’s a series of raise platforms and bunkers around a central hub, and under huge rock arches, which you plummet down between when you are entering the map. It’s quite the thing. This footage gives you a good idea of the general motoring-about that you do in battle, as well getting across the feel of the combat a bit better than previous trailers. Go take a look.Read the rest of this entry »

…which, as Richard pointed out, should be sung to the tune of Rawhide, is set to return. Probably.In a sprawling interview with GamesIndustry.biz, TimeGate bossman Adel Chaveleh said that: “We’re not walking away from Kohan by any means. It’ll see daylight again.” In what form? He wasn’t sure, or able to say, and he wasn’t about to be lured on talking about that Facebook RTS revamp route.

Presumably if the current project, Section 8 – Prejudice, fails to really cement things for the studio, then they will be returning to pastures old. Or perhaps it will get a reboot regardless? Kohan is an old favourite, and its return would certainly be welcome. The other issue that is touched on, which is interesting, is that TimeGate are now moving into self publishing. All the original Kohan games can now be bought from the TimeGate store.